This article engages in a comparative analysis of the foreign policy frameworks employed by East Asian countries of China, Japan, and Korea in pursuing their respective African policy. Having identified some convergence in the policy approach and policy interest, it proceeded to explore the prospect of synergistic interaction in shared areas of interest, viz. how the three...
One of the major challenges facing economies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere under intensive globalization is what Dani Rodrik refers to as the globalization trilemma: National sovereignty, globalization and democracy cannot be had at the same time. In this conceptual paper, the idea of a “regional policy space” beyond the level of national policy spaces is introduced to explore...
Based on an in-depth reading of policy documents and official speeches, this article examines global coordination and cooperation between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the European Union (EU) in the fields of global (green finance) governance. The article follows a three-step approach: It starts with a short evaluation of the PRC’s reconfiguration of its relations with...
The Chinese central authorities have officially started to promote a “national ecological accounting and auditing scheme” (NEAS) to fight against domestic environmental degradation since 2013. Nevertheless, as a global issue, the conservation of ecological environment inevitably involves cooperation among nations in the context of global environmental governance. Through a...
The issue of a declaration to end the Korean War, first proposed by the Roh Moo-hyun administration, was elevated to a crucial status by the Moon Jae-in administration. However, the ambiguous nature of the declaration in terms of international law gave it a space for different understanding and interpretation for the parties concerned, causing the USA to worry about North Korea’s...
This paper explores why is there no regional, multilateral, collective security community like NATO in East Asia and how to construct regional security community from difficult conditions. East Asian regional community originated from two divergent paths of international system: the regional community of commerce called East Asian Mediterranean and Chinese tributary system of hub...
East Asia was slow in establishing free trade agreements (FTAs) compared to other parts of the world, where FTAs began to be actively formed in the late 1980s. Despite a slow start, East Asia quickly caught up with other regions in the FTA race. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been a main player in the FTA race in East Asia, as ASEAN enacted ASEAN Free...
This paper will take a closer look at where Japanese foreign policy made three remarkably orientational changes at the historical crossroads of the Meiji restoration in 1868, American occupation in 1945–1952, and in the post-cold war era of the 1990s. During the post-cold war era, there arose prolonged policy debates where political elites in Japan reached a consensus of its...
This article examines the vicissitudes of Northeast Asian regional integration, with a focus on the development of the trilateral free trade agreement and the trilateral investment treaty. It emphasizes that Northeast Asian regionalism has proceeded through gradualism, informality, and lower-profile approaches as a realistic way for the development of cooperation, which in turn...
This article aims to examine the dynamics of the East Asian political economy and the new regional environments over the past two decades. It puts forth two main propositions. First, the predominant nation–state framework in analyzing the political economy of the East Asian region, while remaining indispensable in its own right, has become inadequate to interpret the profound...